A Demographic View
DeVision is a freely accessible interactive database on the demographic situation and population change in the developed countries. With a friendly user interface in English, French, Russian and Chinese, it is intended for academic research and teaching in demography and in population and development studies.
What makes the project distinctive is that it provides access to primary data and indicators of population change in developed countries over a long historical span — from the beginnings of centralised civil registration of vital events to the present day.
The indicators in the database have been selected, and, in some cases computed, by experts. Their values may therefore differ from those published officially by national and international statistical agencies. When citing them, please refer to this resource as your source.
For a fuller account of the origins and scope of the database, see the page About the project.
Using the database
Data may be retrieved as statistical tables and as charts. Presentation on maps is currently available only for European countries and only for the period after 1946.
To make retrieval easier, countries and indicators are gathered into broadly homogeneous groups — the countries of Eastern Europe, say, or the fertility indicators. For comparative work, the query system offers several classifications of states along geographical and geopolitical lines, as adopted by various scholarly bodies and international organisations.
The project team
- Alexandre Avdeev — Professor Emeritus, Research Centre of Institut de démographie, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne; PhD in Economics; Head of the Historical Demography and Bibliographic Research Division, Research Laboratory of Population Economics and Demography (Centre for Population Studies), Faculty of Economics, Lomonosov Moscow State University.
- Alain Monnier — Retired Senior Researcher, Institut national d’études démographiques (INED), France.
- Vladimir Pshenkin — IT Engineer, expert in information technology and database management, Faculty of Economics, Lomonosov Moscow State University.
- Maria Avdeeva — Senior Lecturer, Department of Population, Faculty of Economics, Lomonosov Moscow State University.